Stephenson, Paul and Vandekerckhove, Wim ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0106-7915 (2014) Expert opinion on the draft law on protection of whistleblowers. Technical Report. Council of Europe PACS Serbia.

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Abstract

In a letter addressed to the joint Council of Europe/European Union project “Strengthening the Capacities of Law Enforcement and Judiciary in the Fight against Corruption in Serbia” (PACS), the Minister of Justice and Public Administration of Serbia has asked the Council of Europe for expert opinion on draft Law on Protection of Whistleblowers. The draft law has been recently approved by the Working Group set by the Ministry. This opinion focuses on the compatibility of the draft law with Council of Europe standards and good practice of different European jurisdictions. In view of that the draft law was assessed against the only detailed international measure on this subject - draft Council of Europe Recommendation on Whistleblowing (hereinafter ‘the CoE Recommendation’). It shows the draft law achieves a high degree of convergence, although a few issues remain. The draft law is skilfully drafted but like all laws seeking to regulate such a complex field, it is open to improvement. Therefore experts team raised several issues in this paper in the expectation that this law may also become a template for other countries, so it is worth going the extra mile to get it as right as it can be. Nevertheless, it is known that ‘the best is the enemy of the good,’ that compromises may have to be made in the Parliamentary process, and that it may not be possible at present to adopt a law that addresses all of the issues. The priority issues are identified in bold. The longest experience of a specific law on whistleblowing is to be found in the UK, (the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998). The operation of that law was recently reviewed by an independent commission and that report had been taken into account when comments in this paper were made (‘the 2013 Report’)1. Given that the opinion was prepared on English translation of the draft law, several of the comments below may relate to simple translation issues which can be easily resolved.

Item Type:	Monograph (Technical Report)
Additional Information:	© Council of Europe 2014
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Whistleblowing, Whistleblowing legislation, Council of Europe, Serbia
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Business Faculty of Business > Department of Human Resources & Organisational Behaviour
Related URLs:	Organisation
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2016 09:31
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/13125

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